1. Field of the Invention
A method and a system consistent with the present invention broadly relates to tracking business documents including employee documents and other business related information. More particularly, the present invention is consistent with providing an integrated, comprehensive method for managing employees, customers, jobs, vendors, contacts and equipment information, and the related documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business owners, especially those who manage large temporary or permanent work forces or a myriad of projects, face an avalanche of documents and expend a tremendous amount of time and resources to properly manage employee documents, improve payroll speed and reliability, manage job and task assignments, match employee skills and qualifications with job requirements, and transfer the required documents to their business partners.
Out-dated, erroneous or lost information, delays, reduced productivity, and low morale are just a few of the problems associated with conventional efforts to exchange documents with business partners and manage workers, documents and associated tasks or jobs. More importantly, in regulated industries, business owners must comply with a host of state and federal requirements and worker certifications, all of which must be tracked, kept current and provided to various business partners including government agencies. In addition, there are numerous issues associated with the proper allocation, tracking, and distribution of funds associated with the projects.
In the environmental industry, for example, an environmental contractor must handle and track multiple workers, multiple projects, multiple state and federal regulations, and thousands of documents almost each and everyday, or face substantial penalties and fines. The contractor must therefore devote significant internal resources for tracking and compliance with industry regulations.
Attempts in the industry have been made to solve these problems. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,049,776 to Donnelly discloses a human resource management system for staffing projects with various workers. For example, Donnelly's system schedules workers based on skills and evaluation of the performance manually entered by the user. Donnelly's system is a very limiting management system, which does not manage documents for the worker and which addresses only a few of the general problems described above. Donnelly does not even begin to address the problems of the environmental industry.
In the healthcare industry, a document information system was designed for addressing specific needs of this specialized industry as taught by U.S. Pat. No. 6,292,783 to Rohler et al. Rohler et al. is also a limiting solution designed for this very specialized industry, which has a data storage means, phone interface means for inputting and retrieving data and a verification means using one or more calendars to verify medical tasks performed to the scheduled ones.
Attempts in the industry are also made to facilitate the transfer of documents from one database to another. For example, in Publication No. 20020174098 to Hsing Kong Wu et al., a database management system integrates the original data sources operating under different Application Program Interface (e.g., ORACLE, SYBASE, MS SQL, IBM DB2, etc.) and transforms these data sources into text files (e.g., EXCEL, XML, WML format) for utilization by different application systems (e.g., IE Browser, Netscape, EXCEL, WAP phone, EOS, or POS in enterprises) via different transmission interfaces (Internet, Intranet, Mobile network) so as to meet the requirements of electronic commerce. In particular, one database is transferred to another database mapping the data fields via multiple operation means. This system, however, is for automatically transferring entire files. The user does not have the flexibility to just transfer the necessary fields. Also, no verification of data is present.
Business owners, managers and other personnel need a real-time system that can accurately track and manage multiple workers, multiple projects, and the associated documentation requirements, without spending an inordinate amount of time entering data, re-keying data, developing reports, and interfacing with conventional payroll and accounting systems. In addition, business owners need a system capable of quickly exchanging information between various business associates.